


Define 'Deeper than Love'

by hallelujah



Category: Sense8 (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 04:16:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5233757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hallelujah/pseuds/hallelujah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Did you feel it, too?<br/>This is not a love story. Just a short bit of writing on my after thoughts on Sense8 and how there could be something much greater than love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Define 'Deeper than Love'

I like to desperately believe that there is something deeper than love. I can see it in moments and feel it with the weight of words. It's usually fleeting and very hard to grasp before I can even begin to understand. But it's there. A feeling or a force greater than love.

I saw it in Sense8. One could chalk it up to great screenplay and writing, but the concept that we can be connected with one another in an even closer way, perhaps in the greatest way possible, is unfathomably tantalizing. The way that their love is depicted through their connection as Sensate is something to be coveted. Yes, it's a story, it might not be real. But the concept calls for a deeper understanding of what it is to be human, and how it is to be human. Is love, marriage, and sex the furthest we can delve into the core of our beings? Love is raw, love is ancient. Of course there are other I can only imagine what it's like to be in someone else's mind. To take it further, what it's like to see through their eyes but also to be by their side as you share your lives.

In the world of Sense8 it wasn't really explained how the cluster is made or born, other than the defining similarity is that they were all born at exactly the same time. Kala and Wolfgang, Will and Riley falling in love and being within the same cluster could either be chance or fate. One can determine that their connections to one another are stronger than that of anyone outside of their cluster could ever be. Riley loved Magnus, but her love for Will is on another plane of mind and emotion that no 'regular' person could ever touch at the core of one's being.

The most defining moment where I most strongly recognized this feeling is when Riley and Will touch and realize how _real_ that it feels, despite not really 'being' there, only being in one another's minds. The brain and the mind are so mysterious in the ways that they work. On screen, it is only acting, but can you imagine the realness of something such as that? To feel a deeper connection than love, an emotion more primal and more personal than mutual affection, attraction, attachment, romantic or platonic.

Yrsa calls love inside a cluster 'pathological' and 'the worse kind of narcissism'. This points towards love in a cluster being compulsive, selfish, and to be conceited of one's self. The negative value being that each person in the cluster becomes such a part of you that it can be just like narcissism, loving yourself, except through another person.

On the other side of the coin, Jonas quotes Angelica as he speaks about Will and Riley's connection:

> _"Angelica believed a sensate experiences love in its purest form."_

The prime example is Will and Riley. In the last episode when Will rescues Riley, he touches her in real life for the first time and the on-screen exchange is so beautiful and is the most powerful representation of a spiritual and emotion connection I have ever seen. The scene flips between Riley and Will, quickly exchanging places with one another to show that Riley is Will, Will is Riley. They are linked in a more intense, deeply-seated relationship that can ever be experienced by the regular homo sapiens. That is the highlight of the show.

To be able to be closer to one person, or many persons, in mind and spirit. To know another as personally as yourself and yet so separate. They are you, you are them.

Yes, it may only be fiction, but we can always dream. We've lost a part of ourselves, a part of our humanity that once connected ourselves to one another in the most mental, emotional, and most human was possible. What makes the human is the mind. But if we do not have what is of mind, does it really even matter? Perhaps, if only it were real.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. I just couldn't get the thoughts and emotions out of my mind after rewatching the show for the 3rd time, always stuck on the way the show's concept tugged at me. I do realize Sense8 is a work of fiction, but like any form of art, it can awaken within us the most primal of emotions. And it really emphasizes the question: "What is human?"


End file.
